The Sanctuary

Overview

A deconsecrated 1889 German Baptist church in Hell's Kitchen where Francis Grasso's residency (DJing from the marble altar) established the blueprint for beatmatching and continuous dance-floor programming, and where post-Stonewall gay men claimed one of New York's first uninhibited dancefloors.

The Sanctuary occupied the Romanesque Revival shell of the Second German Baptist Church (built 1889, architect Henry F. Kilburn), deconsecrated and converted to nightlife by impresario Arnie Lord, who initially operated a club there called simply 'The Church.' After the New York Buildings Department refused a permit over provocative murals (reportedly including a large depiction of Satan facing the altar) management papered over the paintings and reopened as The Sanctuary around 1969. A subsequent ownership change, attributed to two entrepreneurs identified in Tim Lawrence's research as 'Seymour and Shelley,' steered the room toward a predominantly gay male clientele in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall, at a moment when gay men could, for the first time, dance together without constant police threat. By multiple accounts it was 'the first totally uninhibited gay discotheque in America,' drawing a radically mixed crowd of wealthy white uptown regulars, street youth, and sex workers into a single room far exceeding its official 346-person capacity, doormen reportedly stopped counting at a thousand on busy nights. The physical arrangement was the room's defining statement: Francis Grasso, recruited from Tarots on 14th Street in autumn 1969 (his own sequence runs Salvation Two, then Tarots, then the Sanctuary), DJed from the original marble altar, presiding over the congregation below. Working with two turntables and a basic fader (Rek-O-Kut decks in his own account of his early setup at Salvation; Thorens decks are also reported at the Sanctuary), Grasso developed and refined the slip-cue technique, using a felt slipmat to hold a record stationary on a spinning platter, then releasing it precisely on the beat, and extended this into what is now recognized as the earliest documented beatmatching: manually syncing the tempos of two records across the transition. His sets crossed rock (Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Jimi Hendrix, Rare Earth) with Black funk and soul (James Brown, Dyke and the Blazers, Kool and the Gang) and Latin rhythms in continuous, energized arcs that gave the floor no seams between records. A 1971 set taped between roughly 3 and 7 a.m. by a DJ known as Luis Mario (his surname is given as Rizzo in some circulating copies and Orellana in others) captures the crowd chanting, whistling, and screaming at Grasso's climactic cuts, possibly the earliest surviving recording of a DJ-driven dancefloor in this mode. Grasso taught his methods to Michael Cappello and Steve D'Acquisto, though Tim Lawrence places their apprenticeship at the Haven, the room Grasso moved to in 1970, rather than at the Sanctuary itself; either way the technique propagated directly through the scene. In 1971 the director Alan J. Pakula filmed a nightclub sequence at The Sanctuary for his thriller Klute (starring Jane Fonda), with Grasso visible in the background at the altar-booth, making it the best-known contemporaneous filmed record of the room in operation, and among the earliest moving-image documents of a DJ at work in a club. The Sanctuary closed in 1972 under acute pressure: multiple sources describe a cascade of drug enforcement actions (DJHistory cites 33 drug busts across three nights), and the club's manager Shelley Bloom was killed in what is reported as a mob-connected shooting, though independent corroboration of the latter detail is limited to a single account and should be treated as unverified. The building was converted to a theater in 1976 (the Chelsea Theater Center's Westside house, renamed the Westside Arts Theatre in 1981) and, after a renovation, reopened in 1991 as the Westside Theatre, which continues to operate there today. Continuous DJ programming took hold here as a deliberate craft rather than an accident, and the post-Stonewall gay dancefloor it hosted anticipated the Loft, the Gallery, and Paradise Garage. Grasso, who died in Brooklyn on March 20, 2001 at 52, never held the canonical status his innovations warranted in his lifetime; Tim Lawrence's 'Love Saves the Day' (2003) was instrumental in restoring his place at the beginning of the lineage.